The wind in the memories

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The tone was set when I let my airport pick-up in Palermo know that the entire French rail and transit system was going to be on strike the day I was set to fly to Sicily, and she replied with something along the lines of, “It’s not a trip to Sicily without a little travel chaos.” And boy, was she right. On top of the transit strike, the Paris taxis had decided…heck – why not go on strike, too?

But instead of taking a day off, the taxi drivers were planning to instigate “Opération Escargot,” which essentially means driving en mass, as slow as possible, to cause as much disruption as possible. (Whatever happened to fraternité?) In addition to blocking highways and city streets, the taxis were planning to surround the airports, making access difficult, if not impossible.

So my perfect partner said he’d drive me to the airport, which required us to leave at 5 A.M. (for my 10 A.M. flight), because any later, and Opération Escargot would be in full-on move-like-a-snail mode. To make a long story short, I made my flight to Rome just fine, but my flight from Rome to Sicily was inexplicably cancelled. And inexplicably, the airline didn’t have a ticket or customer service office inside the airport.

So, I had to exit the airport completely (and finding the exit was no easy feat, either…), then go back into it, where I used my well-earned skills at making sure people don’t jump the line in front of me – which I perfected in Paris – so that I could ensure that I was booked on a later flight. But for some reason, the airline couldn’t give me my boarding pass for four hours, so I had to pass my hours hovering near the ticket counter, waiting for the clock to strike the magic number. (And yes, this is the short version of the story.)

I finally arrived at Case Vecchio, after 16 hours of travel (only 2 ½ hours of that was actually spent going somewhere), where we ate in the darkness of the Sicilian night, drinking sparkling wine, before my head slammed down on the pillow. And I was out of it